-johnmartin: influences

Friedrich Froebel

Friedrich Froebel's ideas on the importance of play in a child's development pre-dated Dewey's. Although I'm not convinced that the amount of control that he insists the teacher must assert over children, or the dogmatic adherance to his rigid structure, is needed. I prefer to focus on his words embracing creativity from The Education of Man: "The mind grows by self revelation. In play the child ascertains what he can do, discovers his possibilities of will and thought by exerting his power spontaneously. In work he follows a task prescribed for him by another, and doesn’t reveal his own proclivities and inclinations; but another’s. In play he reveals his own original power" (Froebel 1887, p. 281).

John Dewey

John Dewey’s pedagogic creed ties individual learning motivation to socially-mediated experience: "I believe that all education proceeds by the participation of the individual in the social consciousness of the race. This process begins unconsciously almost at birth, and is continually shaping the individual's powers, saturating his consciousness, forming his habits, training his ideas, and arousing his feelings and emotions. Through this unconscious education the individual gradually comes to share in the intellectual and moral resources which humanity has succeeded in getting together. He becomes an inheritor of the funded capital of civilization.” (Dewey 1897, p.77)

Lev Vygotsky

Lev Vygotsky’s Zone of Proximal Development and internalization charts a person's learning process from the social to the individual: "Every function in the child's cultural development appears twice: first, on the social level, and later, on the individual level; first, between people (interpsychological) and then inside the child (intrapsychological). This applies equally to voluntary attention, to logical memory, and to the formation of concepts. All the higher functions originate as actual relationships between individuals" (Vygotsky 1978, p. 57).

Maxine Greene"

Maxine Greene's Educational theory attracts me for its notion of learning's purpose, and its design-based methods: "Human beings define themselves through the projects with which they become involved. By means of engagement with a project, the attitude of wide-awakeness develops and contributes to the choice of actions that lead to self formation. A project means the intentionalized vision or purpose of making or constructing the self and the world" (Greene 1997).

Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger

Jean Lave & Etienne Wenger tie learning to Communities of Practice: "...who a person becomes depends critically on which activity systems he or she participates in and on the support and assistance he or she receives from other members of the relevant communities in appropriating the specific values, knowledge and skills that are enacted in participation.” (Lave & Wenger 1991). More generally, Wenger writes: "Meaning-making comes from active participation in the practices of social communities and constructing identities in relation to these communities” (Wenger 1999, p. 4)

Jim Gee